THE DOOR TO LOST PAGES
By Claude Lalumière
In this new collection of linked short stories Montreal author
Claude Lalumière imagines a used bookstore, Lost Pages, that exists somewhere
in an alternate-reality version of his hometown (the bookstore seems to have no
fixed address, and the doorway to it comes and goes). Two characters, Lucas and
Aydee, discover the store as children, with Lucas going on to take over the
management of it and Aydee becoming his assistant.
Lost Pages, home to a number of shaggy dogs as well as shelves
of "incunabula and esoterica," also operates as a kind of
metafictional nexus, a place with a toehold in different slices of Lalumière's
mythic multiverse. The basic framework, or surreality, has the amorphous hosts
of nightmare, led by a tentacled demon with the appropriately Lovecraftian name
of Yamesh-Lot, locked in an eternal struggle with the feathered angel armies of
the "Green Blue and Brown God" (only "supposedly
benevolent," as with most such deities). This conflict between demons and
angels frequently spills over into our own world, while some "normal"
characters, including a young monster-hunter named Billy, are able to go down
the rabbit hole. In the penultimate story reality splits, as Aydee is shown to
have dual identities inhabiting both planes, and in the "Coda"
Lalumière himself steps both out of and into his own text.
It's a weird, entrancing book informed by a unique vision, told
in a plain, fairy-tale style but including lots of steamy sex as well.
Throughout, Lalumière is fascinated by different states of mind or vision,
often introduced in dreams, through the use of drugs, or during sex. For some
characters the doors of perception are blown outward in consciousness-exploding
orgasmic epiphanies: "Sandra loses all sense of herself; she experiences
life - simultaneously, chaotically, beautifully - through the bodes of countless
creatures . . .", "I am a boy looking at myself everywhere in the
world. I am everyBODY in the world. I gorge on my own flesh . . ." (this
goes on for a couple of pages in the same vein). For others, elevation takes the
more serene form of being lost in a good book . . . or magical bookstore. Either
way it makes for a good trip.
Notes:
Review first published in Quill & Quire, April 2011.
BACK
